Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, essayist, and educator living and working in Philadelphia. They have published poetry, translations, and essays in numerous anthologies and journals, and as well as four poetry books: Caneca de anhelos turbios (2011), oropel/tinsel (2016), huequitos/holies (2016), and tierra intermitente (2017). In 2018, Timeless, Infinite Light will publish their fifth book, lo terciario/the tertiary. Currently, they are a Contributing Editor at The Wanderer. If for Roque Dalton there is no revolution without poetry, for Raquel there is no poetry without Puerto Rico. You can find out more about their work at raquelsalasrivera.com.

Artists, teachers, and other things mentioned in this month's episode:

I got to talk on the phone with poet Kenyatta JP Garcia and their most recent collection Slow Living.

Kenyatta JP Garcia is the author of They Say, Slow Living and ROBOT. JP was raised in Brooklyn but currently resides in Albany, N.Y. where they received degrees in English and linguistics. They are an editor at both Rigorous and Five 2 One Literary Magazine. In a past life, they were a cook for about a dozen years. In this modern incarnation, they get paid to put boxes on shelves by night and by day they read comics, pine, worry, and attempt to craft something worth reading.

In this interview, I get to talk IN-PERSON with Julian Shendelman about his new chapbook, Dead Dad Club (Nomadic Press, 2017).

This is a long interview, an hour and 13 minutes. And we talk about death, so be warned. Make yourself a good cup of tea and settle in.

Julian Shendelman has a weird looking dog (part fawn, part fruit bat) and a nice Jewish boyfriend. After 10 years of living in Oakland, where he was an organizer for the Bay Area Trans Writers Workshop, Julian is relocating to Philadelphia with hopes of having more time to write. He was a 2016 Pushcart nominated poet for his piece in Bat City Review, and won a Literary Death Match with a true story about queer punk cannibalism. His first published chapbook, “Dead Dad Club,” was released by Nomadic Press in March of this year.

This month I had the pleasure of interviewing Ching-In about their recent publication, recombinant. We got to talk about archive, language, history, and gender.

Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press; AK Press) and Here is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press). A Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole and Callaloo Fellow, they are part of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. Their work has appeared in The Best American Experimental Writing, The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. They are a senior editor of The Conversant and poetry editor of the Texas Review.They serve on the Executive Board of Thinking Its Presence: Race, Advocacy, Solidarity in the Arts as the Director of Membership and Social Media. www.chinginchen.com

While I was on the East Coast to attend/table AWP, Tyler Vile and I got the chance to meet up with each other in D.C.'s Green Lantern bar to talk poetry and punk. The photo for this month's episode was taken just after our interview.

Tyler Vile is a writer, performer, and activist from Baltimore, MD whose novel-in-verse, Never Coming Home, is available on Topside Press. She is a member of the Baltimore Transgender Alliance leadership team and the vocalist in a punk band called Anti-Androgen. Her interactive poetry zine, Hassidic Witch Murderer is available on her website. She aspires to one day become the world’s greatest transsexual yenta.

It was such a gift to speak with emerging-talent Aristilde Kirby for this month's episode! Aristilde Kirby is a twenty-five year old lesbian trans-woman poet and songsmith originally from Bronx, NY, but now resides from Carrollton, GA. She is a UGA Master Gardener. She is working on a chapbook entitled [bitácora total bust] and an EP entitled [LA POESÍA DEL CANTE JONDO], which will be out sometime in future recent history, hopefully.

Click through the poems below to read Aris's poems "Strawberry Resirper / Achene Returner" and the four poems in her cycle "Intermediate Starved Aster Egretta SAE."

The name of the woman whose name escaped Aris's mind was we were talking about Aris's recent publication was Ralayzia Taylor. You can donate to her YouCaring for her to help cover medical expenses, food, and secure housing.

This month’s interview is with none other than Jayy Dodd! In this episode we talk about their newest chapbook [sugar in the tank], their work in other genres of art and critique, their views on compensation for artistic labor, and more.

I am so honored to get to speak with Vita E. Cleveland about her recent chapbook Dedications. The conversation, of course, wanders elsewhere: toward her percussion expertise, musings on art's intersection with activism, slut shaming in activist circles, and more.

In this month's episode, Jay Besemer and I talk about his recent book, Chelate, along with other topics, including: living with chronic illness, our relationship with nature, sci-fi, poetry comics, and that old chestnut TRANS TEMPORALITY.

In this episode I talk with Cameron Awkward-Rich about his approaches to poetry and theory, and the poetry in his new book Sympathetic Little Monster.

Cameron has published poems in The Journal, cream city review, Muzzle Magazine, Hobart,The Seattle Review, The Offing and elsewhere. He is a Cave Canem Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, and currently a doctoral candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. Cam is the author of the chapbook Transit (Button Poetry, 2015) and his debut collection, Sympathetic Little Monster, was published by Ricochet Editions in 2016.

Jai Arun Ravine talks to me about their newest book, The Romance of Siam, just released from Timeless, Infinite Light. We talk about their use of humor in critiquing orientalism, the tourist industry in Thailand, and their process as an interdisciplinary artist.

I have no idea what Jim Thompson's "jungle box" looked like, but maybe it was something like this

The sound of waves breaking is a section of the (incredibly long) "Once in a Lifetime" theme song for Thailand's tourism campaign.

In this episode, I had the lovely opportunity to talk to Zoe Tuck in a coffee shop in Oakland. We discuss speculative fiction and poetry, the second wave feminism she navigated during her coming-of-age years, spirituality, trans/ gender variant identities and collective memory, and more.

In this episode, I have the pleasure of interviewing the current editors of Vetch: A Magazine of Trans Poetry and Poetics: Kay Gabriel, Stephen Ira, Liam O'Brien and Rylee Lyman. We talk about their approaches to putting the journal together, their insights into transgender poetics, and touch on the archival of transgender/gender-variant art.

In this interview I get a chance to talk with Joy Ladin. We talk about her latest book Impersonation, how her relationship to poetic language changed as she transitioned, the use of persona in poetry, the early Modernists, and trends in trans & gender-variant poetry.

Today's show features a conversation between Loma and me about the government's influence on poetry, the boundaries of a poem between other objects and being, poetry & activism, struggling with how to write poetry about domestic abuse, fearlessness, and more.